Windschuttle flips again

Henry Farrell pointed me to this Financial Times report of an interview (over lunch) with Keith Windschuttle, which begins with Windschuttle saying he regrets his involvement in the dispute over Australiaâ€™s Aboriginal history, seeing as a distraction from his ambition to write a polemical defence of Western civilisation, aimed at the US market, and make heaps of money in the process.

â€?If you have a reasonably big hit in America youâ€™re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars,â€? he says. â€œThatâ€™s my aim – to have a couple of big sellers and have a leisurely life.â€?

It is unclear how much of this is intended as tongue-in-cheek affectation, but itâ€™s certainly consistent with notable elements of Windschuttleâ€™s past career, which has been marked by repeated political and methodological somersaults.

Although a lot of attention has been focused on Windschuttleâ€™s political jump from Marxist left to Christian right, Iâ€™ve always been more interested in his shift in methodological stance. Having made his name as a defender of objective truth against politicised history in both left-wing and right-wing varieties, Windschuttle has become a practitioner of an extreme form of politicised history, and now looks ready to abandon any remaining links to the world of fact.
Windschuttle first became prominent with his book Unemployment, published in the 1970s, which was mainly a critique of the way unemployed people and the unemployment issue were presented in the media. He did similar work on the media during the 1980s. The underlying methodological viewpoint was straightforward enough: here is the objective reality and here is the way the media distorts it.

With this background, his 1994 book The Killing of History seemed naturally to fit into the genre of left-wing critiques of postmodernism epitomised by the Sokal hoax. Although Windschuttle went over the top at the end (attacking Popper of all people for being insufficiently attached to objective reality) and gave some indications of his shift to the right, the book as a whole did not seem to represent a big break with his past views. Notably, Windschuttle praised Henry Reynolds for sticking to factual account of conflicts between Aborigines and European settlers in Australia, and avoiding any flirtation with notions of socially constructed reality and so forth.

Whatever its original intent, The Killing of History was taken up enthusiastically by some US rightwingers, notably those associated with the New Criterion, and Windschuttle responded in kind, espousing overtly rightist positions for the first time.

From the viewpoint of Windschuttleâ€™s new admirers, however, objective reality is fine when it can be used a handy stick with which to beat left-wing postmodernists, but it takes second place to the rhetorical needs of the contemporary political struggle. As has become increasingly apparent under the Bush Administration, â€˜factsâ€™ are not of any significance in themselves, but only as they suit or fail to suit the interests of the Republican party at any given point.

This approach is exemplified by Windschuttleâ€™s writing on Australian history, most notably The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Windschuttleâ€™s approach, familiar from the right-wing blogosphere is that of a counsel for the defence of the European occupiers of Australia against any and all accusations of killing the Aboriginal inhabitants. All the usual mechanisms are deployed. Trivial errors on the part of opponents are blown up into causes celebre, witnesses of killings and massacres are slandered, and the victims are blamed for their own misfortune.

Despite its obvious biases though, Fabrication does not overtly depart from the idea of fact-based history. Windschuttle merely selects the facts that suit his case, ignores or seeks to discredit those that do not, and accuses his opponents of bias while denying his own.

In the end, though, even such limited obeisances to objectivity are inconsistent with the kind of mass-market success Windschuttle is seeking. The kind of large-scale claims about the moral and ethical perfection of European Christian civilisation that Windschuttleâ€™s target market wants to read cannot be supported by primary research or footnote-checking, any more than the politically-driven denunciations of â€˜dead white malesâ€™ that Windschuttle criticised in The Killing of History. Polemics of this kind rely on a sympathetic audience, willing to suspend disbelief as they are presented with claims that contradict well-established historical facts.

The basic problem for supporters of the polar positions in this debate is the obvious fact that, like all other civilisations, the European Christian civilisation is responsible for both great achievements and great crimes. It is possible to disagree about the relative balance of the two. But an approach like Windschuttleâ€™s, in which the crimes are absolutely denied is no more credible than the kind of revisionist history in which all the achievements of European civilisation are alleged to have been stolen from Arabs and Africans.

By the time he writes and publishes his book, the Bush administration will be no longer. The next administration might be the Hilary Clinton administration, or the Guliani administration, or the Frist administration, but whatever it is, the zeitgeist is likely to be different, with facts no longer an optional extra. If the fallout from Katrina is enduring, the zeitgeist is likely to be very different.

And even if it isn’t, it’s a bit of a conceit of Windschuttle to think some blow in from Australia is going to beat all the hucksters on the pseudo-academic religious right who are peddling the same stuff. As Glenn says, it is a crowded field.

Thank God Windshuttle finally nailed his colours to the mast!
Although if he is looking for a sympathitic audience ready to suspend disbelief then I would suggest he may be shopping in the right market.
Anyway one would assume one has a leisurely life if one is leisurley with ones research.

BTW – Dave Ricardo makes an excellent point – if the mood after Katrina is enduring then a different tenor may prevail (although Windshuttle may pick up that odd hundred-grand regardless).
I might have to reassess the price odds!

The next administration might be the Hilary Clinton administration, or the Guliani administration, or the Frist administration, but whatever it is, the zeitgeist is likely to be different, with facts no longer an optional extra.

This sounds naive. Administrations come and go, but there’s always an official narrative that nothing to do with facts. It may not be as insultingly absurd as it is now, but that’s even worse.

I hope Mr Ricardo is right, but it depends on the nature of the shock. A book about the glories of unfettered capitalism in 1929 would have rotted in the warehouses; a sympathetic account in English of fascism carried a dotted line to an English prison shortly thereafter.

Am I right in saying the right wing triumphalist view first made a lot of money for its writer with Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’ in 1992?

The Great Crash rotting in the warehouse? Please tell me you are referring to another literay masterpeice! If their is any economist more informative to the layperson (other than PrQ),then please substitute Galbraith’s name here!

What “flip”? JQ, are you sure you aren’t on the Writers’ Committee of the Soviet Union?

It is clear that what Windschuttle is regretting isn’t his stance, but the fact that he walked into a minefield unwittingly. He is not adopting a different view, i.e. flipping, he is regretting the amount of flak he copped and making it clear that with hindsight he wouldn’t have started that particular hare.

None of this tells you whether he is right or wrong, whether he thinks or thought that he was right or wrong, or whether others have in fact triumphed over him or (if they have) whether it was through the force of reason or mere superior claque. It is clear that whatever happened we have at least as much heat and smoke as light, and that the whole story casts no credit on anyone involved – for or against Windschuttle.

It is clear that whatever happened we have at least as much heat and smoke as light, and that the whole story casts no credit on anyone involved â€“ for or against Windschuttle.

Nonsense. Apart from springing some bung footnotes, as far as I have been able to tell, the Windschuttle interpretation of history was stillborn on the overhated pages of Quadrant and the Murdoch press. Still, it’s an ill wind, and James Boyce’s demolition of The Fabrication stands as one one the most accomplished essays in Australian historiography in recent times.

“Windschuttleâ€™s approach, familiar from the right-wing blogosphere is that of a counsel for the defence of the European occupiers of Australia against any and all accusations of killing the Aboriginal inhabitants.”

– is overstating it. Windschuttle accepts that many Aboriginals were killed in Tasmania and lists the relevant incidents at the back of his book. He says he will include any further instances where he believes the evidence is sufficient to establish the case.

The odd thing about Fabrication is that it just won’t go away, despite its critics wishing that it would. I’m more sympathetic than most here to Windschuttle, and I can see his problem. He’s set this hare running that he’s going have to keep chasing for years, even though, by the sounds of it, he’s largely lost interest, having made his point already. He’s right in the sense that, post-September 11th, there are much bigger fish for conservatives to fry, and he wants to fry some. He wants to be part of a great defence of western culture, its aspirations and outcomes, against Islamist jihadism, and he’s held back by the need to keep extending, defending and re-defending his parochial heresies. Victim of his own success, I guess.

Be interesting to watch his onward trajectory. – assuming he can escape the black armband that now seems to tether him by the ankle.

The basic problem for supporters of the polar positions in this debate is the obvious fact that, like all other civilisations, the European Christian civilisation is responsible for both great achievements and great crimes. It is possible to disagree about the relative balance of the two.

Occidental civilization – Christian values piggybacking on Caucasian bodies as they conquered the world – has its share of crimes for which it ought to be accountable. But the modern trend to black armbanding the Christian Church and European Empires is silly. Bringing univeral religion and rational commerce to the non-European world mostly did them a favour.

It strains credibility to treat European civilization as morally equivalent to all others, with no obvious net advantages. One may as well say that scientists have made mistakes so one cannot make an overall judgement on the superiority of science as a means of systematic inquiry.

The fact is that the West has been the best and brightest civilization on this planet. It is embarassing to have to point this out since bragging is uncouth, but it is nevertheless so.

Charles Murray, of disreputable AEI notoriety, has certainly beaten Windschuttle to the punch in the civilizational summation stakes. Murray’s methodology is fanaticly objectivist and factual, but his conclusions are still somewhat triumphalist – at least as far as the positive achievements of the West are concerned. Steve Sailer summarises the scoreboard:

Dead white European males dominate his inventories, despite Murray reserving eight of his 21 categories (including Arabic literature, Indian philosophy, and Chinese visual art) for non-Western arts. Murray, who was a Peace Corp volunteer in Thailand and has half-Asian children, began this project wanting to devote even more attention to Asian accomplishments but found he couldnâ€™t justify his predisposition.

In the sciences, 97 percent of the significant figures and events turned out to be Western. Is this merely Eurocentric bias? Of the 36 science reference books he drew upon, 28 were published after 1980, by which time historians were desperately searching for non-Westerners to praise. Only in this decade has the most advanced non-Western country, Japan, begun to win science Nobels regularly.

I must say that I found Murray’s results hard to square with Chinese priority, if not preeminence, in so many technological innovatons. But then they had no Tessler or Edison.

And Murray, contra Windschuttle, is scathing in both theory and practive about the deformations of post-modernist intellectual impostors.

Murray spends more than half of the book justifying his epistemology. But that he must do this is a sign of our times, when reflexive relativism exerts such a hold on so many and qualifies as responsible scholarship.

PS On the subject of Grumpy Old ex-Left wingers, like Windschuttle, I think the solution to this puzzle is fairly clear: as the Young Lefties aged their effortless ability to pick up nubile girls started to wane and they started to move into a higher tax bracket. So they became Old Righties: conservative in culture and regressive in economics.

The triumphalism of western civilisation is clearly more about timing rather than any inherent superiority.

Go back 500 years and the same type of people would be making the same arguments, except that they would be Chinese. A further 500 years and it would be proponents of Islamic culture. And so on and so on.

Each one of them would be able to plausibly make the claim that they were superior to any civilisation before it. But it that by itself is not a very strong argument supporting their inherent superiority as

1) It could equally be made by each of the leading civilisations that have existed before it.
2) Each new civilisation builds on the acheivments of predecessor civilisations.

It is simply impossible that Western Christian civilisation would be in the dominant position it has today without the benefits it gained from other advanced civilisations that preceded it.

If western civilisation had dominated most, or even a very large part of human history there would be a case to be made. But it seems pretty foolish to be making arguments about the superiority of Christian Civilisation when it seems likely that the dominination of Western Christianity will be over within 150 years and the most advanced cultures on the planet are likely to be Asian or Indian, assuming globalisation has not rendered such groupings meaningless.

The fact is that the West has been the best and brightest civilization on this planet. It is embarassing to have to point this out since bragging is uncouth, but it is nevertheless so
Even accepting that point (though still working it out provides valuable perspective) you have to ask how the likely audience for Windschuttle’s proposed book would process the information – it would be further confirmation of worldview that is very uncouth in its bragging, that refuses all other perspectives and embarks on deeply flawed ideas like the Project for a New American Century.

And lets not kid ourselves, they’re not talking about ‘western ideas’ as superior, they’re talking about a specific strand of the culture wars that they seem to be dominating in, at least in the US popular media.

“On the subject of Grumpy Old ex-Left wingers, like Windschuttle, I think the solution to this puzzle is fairly clear: as the Young Lefties aged their effortless ability to pick up nubile girls started to wane and they started to move into a higher tax bracket. So they became Old Righties: conservative in culture and regressive in economics.”

Hooray – at last Jack Strocchi says something I can agree with! I said something similar a couple of weeks back, but don’t let me claim credit for Jack’s epiphany.

Meanwhile, I can’t agree with Dave Ricardo that the near certainty of change in the staffing of the palace on Pennsylvania Avenue will do much to limit the sales of Windshuttle’s mooted triumphalist tome. The US bourgeoisie has a limitless appetite for praise, no matter how mawkish and divorced from reality. The generation currently in the ascendency was weaned on a diet of Walt Disney cinematic hagiographies of genocidal imperialists like Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill. They’ll lap it up. Maybe the royalty cheques will be fat enough to make our hero attractive to the nubile set again. There’s no justice in history, even the made-to-order variety.

The errors that Windschuttle exposes are not “trivial”, nor are they simply drawing attention to a “few bung footnotes”. His historical method is quite straightforward, at least in a Thuycididean sense, namely what can we say about the past from the objective evidence that we have available?

This approach has little support on the Left, of course. For the Left, history is, as Bolingbroke defined it, “politics looking backwards”.

For example, the idea that the settlement of Australia by the British was an essentially benign and progressive mission, a sort of Anglo-Saxon Aenid, where even the worst of that society could build a fine civilisation from not very much at all, needs to be overturned.

After all, how can a revolution be made when the people are so pleased with themselves? Dark deeds must be uncovered, foul murders exposed, thefts, deceptions and genocide. The pioneers must be discredited, their true natures revealed. Only by destroying the smug complacency of the established history can the shining path to a better future be found.

So the Left produces history that is more suited to its purposes.

The trouble is that the sources and voices that they need to fashion the alternative story are not there. So they make them up, they surmise, they interpret. This is story telling, it is not history

Windschuttle blows the whistle on all this. He exposes the falsehoods, the “fabrications” that history as agitprop produces. His targets flail about, but they can’t lay a glove on him.

One of the great benefits of being an ex-lefty is that, as it was said of Doug (or was it Dinsdale?) Pirahna, “you know all the tricks”.

to take up your Monty Python metaphor, the problem is that Windschuttle, like Dinsdale, has been nailing historians’ heads to the floor, and also like Dinsdale, has been caught on film, so to speak, doing it.

In the big picture, I’m on the Almighty’s side. Yet I concede that Windschuttle has had a transient populist polemical appeal. Yet the cold truth is that he has scored a zero in turning scholarship, bar turning more attention to footnotes. Whatever anyone says, I think Windschuttle deserves some praise for his proof-reading.

I’ve read Fabrication. I thought it was a provocative book that made many very good and telling points, but itelf exhibited some methodological and evidentiary flaws that raised doubts about the nature of the whole of Windschuttle’s enterprise – as a contribution to ‘objective’ history. As an addition to rhetoric, it succeeded beyond all expectations. For all that it was a brave and salutary effort, and a work, I think, of great courage. . What we need now is another scholar to produce a truly objective history of Aboriginal Tasmania. If KW has done no more than prompt such an endeavour, we will still be in his debt.

Agree with J F Beck. KW was completely unfazed by Boyce and the others who contributed to Whitewash. His riposte in Quadrant was entitled ‘Whitewash confirms fabrication of Aboriginal history’. That’s how put-down he felt about it. Much of Boyce’s essay is fair criticisim – not in itself refutation, but reasonable rebuttal – but he spoils it with emotive references to ‘our beautiful van Diemonian earth’. Smacks of desperation.

There’s a valid and viable refutation of Windschuttle still out there in the ether somewhere but no-one has written it yet.

With respect Rob, Boyce has cleared the field, whatever Quadrant imagines. Still, beyond the irresonsible and reprehensible populism against vulnerable folks, I agree that intellectual challenges in general are good things. No perfect history will ever be written. Accepting this is a condition of the maturity-leave-pass to enter the discipline in the first place. Yet only an idiot would discount the want of trying for its inherent fallibility.

Pretty much in agreement, Chris. We will just have to see how it shakes out. Reynolds was caught out in a particularly egregious error – misquoting Governor Arthur to the point of reversing what he actually said . Ryan was found to have used false footnotes. Her defences so far have been pretty poor. They are going to have to live with that. None of this actually makes Windschuttle’s overall thesis correct, but it has pretty seriously de-fanged his opponents. The next generation’s history of Aboriginal Tasmania will be a very interesting one, and Windschuttle will have enriched it, for his contribution, good or ill, cannot be ignored. Quite an achievement for an ‘amateur’.

One of the passages of Fabrication that lives with me is the statement, by Tasmania’s Solicitor-General, in the course of a public debate about ‘extirpation’, that certain atrocities against the blacks had been such as to merit death (by those who perpetrated them) ten times over. There’s a whole package of stuff to be unscrambled right there. I wish Windschuttle had pursued these quotes further. No doubt future historians will do so.

As regards Reynolds, the fact that a close and hostile examination of his work has managed to turn up one erroneous quote suggests to me that the whole is very accurate. Ryan certainly seems to have been sloppy, but she is a relatively minor figure – the general view of what happened in Tasmania does not depend on her relatively recent work.

By the standards he applies to Reynolds, Windschuttle’s own work has been discredited many times over.

Keith has his work cut out for him. Hagiohistory is a crowded field over there, what with your Hansons and Lewises and Huntingtons.

Condell is hard to please. It is a travesty to belittle as “hagohistory” the monumental works of scholarship these writers have put out. The only problem with these scholars is their occasional tendency to move of the academic reservation and into the booby-trapped world of op-ed writing, usually in a right-wing direction.

Hanson has written a superb book on the rise of Hellenic civilization, but has obviously succumbed to war fever when he writes on military matters but. Likewise Lewis is the go-to scholar on the rise of Arabic civilization, but should have kept his mouth shut on foreign policy. Huntington is one of America’s most respected scholars, on both the development of American civilizaton and its propensity to Clash with others. He has managed to not put a foot wrong on matters of public policy, largely because he has kept his mouth shut.

They all compare favourably to other writers who have had a go at this growing field of Big Picture history, eg Schama, Ferguson, Diamond,

This makes me supect that Glen Condell’s problem with these writers is ideological, rather than intellectual. Which means he is guilty of the sin he accuses them of.

What is the nature of this Western Civilisation that needs assistance from the wackos of the wing nut Right to defend itself against the wackos of the religious islamic Right? Windshuttle is simply making the point that a person has to make a living somehow, and at the moment, the best way to make a good living, is to ensure that your writings support, endorse and defend the current social, political and economic status quo.

The powerful reward their friends and punish their enemies. Why should New Ltd pay some scribbler who attempts to throw some doubt on the idea that the world view espused by News represents the apotheosis of Western civilisation? The think tanks with money and influence are those that people with lots of money like to fund. It’s not so hard to work out. What is so funny, is the fact that so many misunderstand the nature of much of what passes for the so called ‘culture wars’, and miss completely the basic fact that what we have are a series of well funded claques, paid for and supported by the powerful, to do the work that the real elites simply have no time for. Heck, it’s a living.

Elizabeth Says: September 14th, 2005 at 6:01 pm
Has anyone actually read The Fabrication of ABoriginal History? Just trying to do a straw poll. Yes or No. (I bought a remaindered copy, but still to read it)

It seems that since Liz’s post, the great majority of posters haven’t read the book – would that be true? If so, what is indeed the fuss.

Those who believe that Windschuttle merely picks over footnotes to achieve a â€œtransient populist appealâ€?, that has been â€œdiscredited many times overâ€?, have clearly not read his book. But if â€œthe almightyâ€? canâ€™t see further than their prejudice, His or Her omniscience isnâ€™t what it used to be.

The first volume of “The Fabrication of Aboriginal History” is on its third printing. It obliterated the Tasmanian genocide thesis so thoroughly that black-armband historians are falling all over each other to protest that they never did hold to that orthodoxy. Or they are equivocating between “genocide”, “cultural genocideâ€?, â€œgenocidal momentsâ€? etc. They have failed to challenge Windschuttleâ€™s death toll statistics – unless you call promises of data that is never delivered, ad hominem and misrepresentation a challenge. They have retreated so far that they are now saying that all the debate is about is whether the true death toll can â€œbe precisely knownâ€?!

Windschuttleâ€™s book bulges with FACTS that demonstrate how the Tasmanian black-armband history was fabricated (the erroneous footnotes mentioned above are only a tiny tip of the iceberg). So far no one has presented here any FACTS that Windschuttle evaded or got wrong! Even witch trials require evidence. So I appeal to those who recognize the mark of the devil; please re-read whichever get-Windschuttle hatchet job(s) convinced you, and bring to this debate any FACTS you can find against Windschuttle. Facts about the historical record rather than about how many academics call Windschuttle names. Hundreds of them have been chasing the prize for the anti-Windschuttle potion for years now – what have they come up with?

John Q, Windschuttle’s critics have done him over to their own complete satisfaction, largely on the basis of his perceived political agenda, but the arguments in Whitewash are really pretty thin. Reynolds wastes most of his essay on ad hominen attacks and only towards the end of it gets round to questioning KW’s actual historical methodology. By then the reader is tired of the abuse anyway.

John D, my major reservation about KW is his treatment of George Augustus Robertson. who is presented as a witness of truth when it suits KW’s argument, but as the opposite when it does not. A historian that uses the key witness in that way has to explain the reasons very carefully, and I don’t think KW does. Maybe Keith is right in treating him that way, but it fails to convince. My feeling after having read Fabrication was one of wanting to find and read his account myself and make up my own mind. I’d regard that as a serious flaw in any historical work and I think it is such in KW’s case.

I’ve not read your own book yet but I enjoyed your essays in Quadrant.

So I appeal to those who recognize the mark of the devil; please re-read whichever get-Windschuttle hatchet job(s) convinced you, and bring to this debate any FACTS you can find against Windschuttle. Facts about the historical record rather than about how many academics call Windschuttle names. Hundreds of them have been chasing the prize for the anti-Windschuttle potion for years now â€“ what have they come up with?

Perhaps you could briefly demonstrate how you rebut Mark Finnane rebuttal of Windschuttle?

Interested observers can find an early version of Finnane’s rebuttal here with a more detailed version available in Whitewash.

Also do you agree with this statement by Windschuttle:

Despite its infamous reputation, Van Diemen’s Land was host to nothing that resembled genocide, or any intention to exterminate the Aborigines. In the entire period from 1803 when the colonists first arrived, to 1834 when all but one family of Aborigines had been removed to Flinders Island, the British were responsible for killing only 118 of the original inhabitants. In all of Europe’s colonial encounters with the new worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, the colony of Van Diemen’s Land was probably the site where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed.

That last quoted paragraph is probably accurate but misleading in a number of respects. These are: it’s not the absolute numbers but the proportion of the population that counts; it’s not the direct destruction but the indirect effects that count, the analogues of habitat destruction and so on; and, the statistics are necessarily only estimates, and subject to whatever bias the interpreter may have.

That said, Windschuttle is clearly aiming at bringing out the facts of the situation and minimising observer bias, not only of the lefty black armband sort but from any variety of intellectual honesty, and his information does support his conclusion. Don’t forget that most of these biases are self adjusting, when used as here for comparison with comparable scenarios in other times and places. So this summary does accurately support the limited inference draws here.

As Homer Simpson once said dismissively, “Facts! You can prove anything with facts!”.

I’d disagree that Windschuttle is “clearly aiming at bringing out the facts of the situation and minimizing observer bias” – he might claim this rhetorically, but in practice he has clearly done everything to reduce the reported Aboriginal deaths.

For example, it takes a very big leap of faith to assume that every Aboriginal death has been reported accurately in the historical literature. So statements such as “the British were responsible for killing only 118 of the original inhabitants” are far from being facts.

The comparison issue is also interesting. If we took Windschuttle’s methodology and applied it to any other historical conflict we would have to radically reduce the deaths. For example, how many Cambodian’s were executed under Pol Pot, or Maoris killed in the various New Zealand wars? If we only accepted death’s for which there are eye witnesses who left records, we would get a considerably lower count than the numbers quoted in the history books. So far from the biases being self-adjusting, we are getting the exact opposite.

My feeling after having read …. was one of wanting to find and read his account myself and make up my own mind. Iâ€™d regard that as a serious flaw in any historical work …

Funnily, he says, hopping over to the other side of the argument, I’d regard that as good result if I was the author. A book that stimulates further inquiry, and especially a book that tempts readers back to the original sources, can’t be all bad, even if it is this otherwise regrettable tome. In such cases, to adapt an Ashes saying, history is the winner.

While the other “Whitewash” contributors declare Windschuttleâ€™s tally of 118 (now 121) Tasmanian Aborigines killed by whites to be too extraordinarily low to be believable, Mark Finnane declares it to be so extraordinarily high that it makes the Tasmanian colonists the bloodiest of four continents for four centuries. Worse, for instance, than the Spanish conquistadors who killed 40,000 Aztecs in the last days of the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521.

Finnaneâ€™s trick is to assume that the only meaningful death toll figure is the per-head-per-annum statistic. So the killing of one Tasmanian Aborigine becomes as bloody a deed as the killing of ten, twenty, fifty whites; because the white population was ten, twenty or fifty times the size of the Aboriginal population. So statistics that show that an Aborigine was nearly twice as likely to kill a colonist than be killed by one, portrays him as the victim of a one sided slaughter.

If you accept this methodology, you have to accept that the killing of one Tasmanian Aborigine was not only as atrocious as the killing 10 whites, but was as atrocious as the killing of 100 mainland Aborigines â€“ or, that the killing of one New Zealander is as heinous as killing five Australians, which is as horendous a massacre as killing 50 Indians.

This, along with Finanneâ€™s disgusting misrepresentations, demonstrates only one thing: if youâ€™re a highly ranked academic, anything goes, as long as it â€œdiscreditsâ€? the right foe.

Rob raises a valid point when he says that Windschuttle believes some of George Augustus Robinsonâ€™s reports and disbelieves others. So do the orthodox historians – there is really no alternative. Robinson is the most prolific and sympathetic recorder of the Aboriginal side of the colonisation of Tasmania, so to ignore his reports would be to deny the best witness for their side of the story. On the other hand, so many of his reports have been proved false, that historians have to judge the credibility of each report by cross checking it. Windschuttle always gives his reasons for believing a report or not.

Ken Miles Says: September 15th, 2005 at 4:11 pm “The comparison issue is also interesting. If we took Windschuttleâ€™s methodology and applied it to any other historical conflict we would have to radically reduce the deaths. For example, how many Cambodianâ€™s were executed under Pol Pot, or Maoris killed in the various New Zealand wars? ”

Well, take Katrina for example. The media was running red hot that the total deaths could reach 10,000. The last reporrt I read tallied the number to 261.

Paranoid conspiracy theories is a hallmark of the lunar right. What’s more interesting is how they continue to thrive, despite the right commanding virtually every important political office and media outlet in the country.

cs, if I felt on reading an account based on the most important primary source that I needed to read that source for myself, I would say that thhe account I’d just read had failed in some regard. It’s not quite the same as one’s curioisity being stimulated to further enquiry – rather that one feels unconvinced and feeling in need of verification. I take John D.’s point, however.

It’s insane this fixation by Windschuttle on precisely documented numbers. He seeks to tidy up the agony and the murder into precisely known quantities that can be safely audited and tucked away in the mental drawer.

The plea by someone up above that we not be ideological about this subject is equally insane. As though a final factual solution can be arrived at from which point we will no longer have anything to learn.

My ideology is primary in my thinking on subjects such a these. Ends do not justify means. Murder and invasion are not exculpated by later technological and economic success. It’s irrelevant which way the arrow points on the road of human civilsation. Wrongs remain wrong, and must be atoned for. For the sake of all. The demands of human psychology are vainly scorned when we refuse to make a sober accounting of our origins. Eventually the price must be paid. It’s our choice – when. But the bill must be paid with interest the longer we procrastinate, grizzle and deny.

It is a give-away of our social immaturity that we still won’t face up to the past. We lag way behind other recent colonizing civilisations such as NZ and Canada. What the bejeesus are we afraid of. Nobody’s going to take away our toys when we finally come clean and put the mess behind us.

Although Windschuttle adheres to an extreme form of positivism most of the time, he can mix it with postmodernism when it suits his book.

Take his claim that the Tasmanians had no concept of land ownership and therefore could not be fighting to defend their land. The first part is typical Windschuttle (he could not find evidence of a word for ‘land’ and therefore assumed one must not exist). The second part is an extreme version of socially constructed reality.

Professor Quiggin refers, in his original post, to: “Windschuttleâ€™s political jump from Marxist left to Christian right“.

Not sure quite what Prof Q is driving at here. If he means that Keith Windschuttle is himself a Christian rightist, then I beg to differ.

In an E-mail last February – addressing, inter alia, this very issue – KW told me (I don’t think I’m breaching any confidences by reporting this message on a public forum: if I am, I apologise to all concerned) that he himself practised no religion of any sort.“I’m not a Christian [he wrote], though would regard myself a Christian fellow traveler (this is a term borrowed from Gough Whitlam).”

what he really meant was ‘they have no Western concept of land ownership’ or ‘they haven’t even made it as far as contracts yet’. There’s a prejudice built into such an unqualified statement; Ross Cameron sans bombast, Crichton Browne sans deliberate offense. The notion that communities might share ‘ownership’ of traditional lands doesn’t seem to cut ice or mustard with Windschuttle. They had no piece of paper certifying ownership, or any evidence acceptable to our man, so they couldn’t have been defending their land? Dear me. The fact that they didn’t have a Western concept of evidence has cruelled them for the Windschuttles of the world.

Speaking of Western concepts of evidence, I wonder if the fact that the US military ‘doesn’t do body counts’ bothers him at all. Quite apart from the fact that many of those killed were blown into pieces too small to be adduced as evidence of anything. Precious little evidence for future Windschuttles. Which of course will suit them down to the ground.

History is supposedly written by the winners. Mr W, like your Davis Hansons, fancies himself among that group and even dreams of conquering Rome (with his next tome)and settling down among the Romans as an esteemed warrior from the provinces.

For one, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that Mark Finnane has never said anything which can be accurately phrased as:

Mark Finnane declares it to be so extraordinarily high that it makes the Tasmanian colonists the bloodiest of four continents for four centuries. Worse, for instance, than the Spanish conquistadors who killed 40,000 Aztecs in the last days of the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521.

At least, his article in Whitewash suggests the exact opposite. Given that you haven’t supplied a source for your paraphrase, I’d humbly suggest that you’ve significantly misrepresented argument.

Finnane has tried to refute the notion that early Tasmanian history wasn’t particularly violent. He hasn’t (at least as far as I’m aware) tried to show that Tasmania was “the bloodiest of four continents for four centuries” – in fact, has anybody suggested this?

By using Windschuttle’s population and death statistics, it is quite easy to show that from the Aboriginal point of view Tasmania was a violent place (and the levels of violence skyrocket if one uses Willis’ death rates). Violence between Aborigines and settlers lead to death rates similar to Australian death rates in World War I (given that Finnane compares Tasmanian death rates to WWI, this directly contradicts your claim about Finnane suggesting that it was the bloodiest conflict in four centuries – have you read Whitewash?).

Also youâ€™re trying to attribute a moral argument to Finnane which he doesn’t make. Nothing he has written in Whitewash suggests that he considers that an Aboriginal life is worth more or less than a European life. Rather he is trying to judge the level of violence in various societies by looking at the available statistics. The corresponding violence levels are far more consistent with the mainstream historical view, rather than Windschuttles.

RJS, I think Windschuttle is a political Christian: that is, he sees Christianity as a source of the superiority of the West, but does not actually accept the supernatural part of Christian belief. This is very common on the intellectual right, particularly in the US

FACTS are the facts totally absent from diatribes such as Glenn Condellâ€™s.

If Condell bothered to read Windschuttleâ€™s book he would discover that it didnâ€™t expect Aborigines to have land ownership contracts, or even the notion of individual ownership of land, it discussed ownership, be it private or â€œcommunalâ€?. Other colonised cultures, such as the Maori, had a concept of ownership; the Tasmanianâ€™s didnâ€™t. So of course it was the Western concept that was considered, thatâ€™s the point, there was no such Tasmanian concept to consider, at least not as far as land was concerned.

And if Condell bothered to read Windschuttleâ€™s book he would discover that it doesnâ€™t demand forensic proof, but â€œevidence of some kindâ€? of killings. As Robert implies, the alternative methodology is â€œarbitrary, random, â€˜politically chosenâ€™ numbers.â€?

Ken Miles says I misrepresented Mark Finnane. I retract any implication that Finnane said that the British in Tasmania were worse than the Spanish at Tenochtitlan or the bloodiest colonists of four centuries, and apologize. To my knowledge Finanne has made no such comparisons. They were badly formulated illustrations of mine.

Finnane does compare the Tasmanian colonization to â€œplaces like New England, north-western Canada, Brazil, south-western Africa and elsewhere from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuryâ€?, and if you go by his methodology you can make Tasmania worse than almost anywhere. By relying entirely on the per-capita-per-annum statistic, Finnane can conclude that the Tasmanian Aborigines were: â€œdisproportionately
affected by the violence of the early colonial years, and to an extraordinary degreeâ€?. His graph in Whitewash titled: â€œEstimated violent death rates in Tasmania, 1824-1831 based on Windschuttle data 2002â€? depicts soaring death rates for Aborigines, nearly twenty times as high as the white death rates â€“ for years when more whites were being killed than Aborigines. Doesnâ€™t this imply that the violence was much worse for the Aborigines than for the whites? And if the violence was much worse for the Aborigines than for the whites while nearly twice as many whites were being killed than Aborigines, doesnâ€™t that imply a white life, according to Finnaneâ€™s calculations, is worth less than an Aboriginal life?

The per capita death rate has regularly been used (often by writers on Windschuttle’s side of debates over colonialism) to make the point that the death rate in apparently low-intensity warfare between hunter-gatherer tribes exceeds that in European wars like WWI. It’s not surprising that the same point would be made in the present context. There’s some discussion here

To answer Elizabeth’s question, I have not read Fabrication. I have, however, read several pieces by Windshuttle summarising his position, as well has heard him speak in debates.

Based on this I am in no position to judge whether Windshuttle is more or less correct than Reynolds in the total estimates of Tasmanian Aboriginal deaths. It is however clear that Windshuttle is coming from a deeply biased ideological perspective, as he accuses his opponents of being (which is not to say that they are not similarly guilty).

The evidence can be seen from one example where there were disputed reports of the number of Aborigines killed in an incident. Windshuttle chooses to accept the lower figure. His critics choose the higher figure on the basis that the witness reporting it is more credible. Windshuttle then states that the lower figure is correct, and that anyone arguing for a higher figure (or even splitting the difference) is clearly ideological and black armband.

The position is simply unsustainable. If Windshuttle was saying “the number of deaths may be as low as 118” he might have a case. But to state that “the British were responsible for killing only 118 of the original inhabitants” when he knows that there is evidence the total is higher proves he is simply on an ideological charge.

Of course, even if one accepts the higher figure in this case, the total is still much closer to Windshuttle’s figures than Reynolds, but the point that he resoultely refuses to accept extra deaths *as even possible* when a credible eyewitness reports them shows he will go to any lengths to minimse the toll.

And Elizabeth – hopefully the death toll from Katrina will be well short of 10,000, but anyone who thinks the final toll is going to be 261 is in fantasy land.

A number of people have referred to Windschuttleâ€™s Tasmanian death toll.

Web objects that it is an attempt to tuck it away. The reason the death toll had to be tabulated was to bring some reality to the debate. Prior to Windschuttleâ€™s work orthodox historians regularly threw around impressions and â€œgeneral estimatesâ€? supported by nothing but a few anecdotes, true or fabricated. Consequently the worldwide wisdom that genocide was committed in Tasmania became entrenched. Windschuttle puts his evidence up for all to see, scrutinize and criticize â€“ for the most part his opponents donâ€™t.

Ken Miles asks whether I agree with Windschuttleâ€™s statement regarding a death toll of 118. I do if it is taken as shorthand for his full statement that it represents: â€œan attempt to record every killing of an Aborigine between 1803 and 1834 for which there is a plausible record of some kind.â€? That statement was followed by a request that readers send him records he may have missed. The first printing of “Fabrication” recorded 118, the second 120, and on Windschuttleâ€™s website Table Ten now records 121. The last addition was a killing recorded by John Wedge that was discovered by James Boyce. As best as I can discover, it represents the one and only genuine record of the one and only killing of the one and only Aborigine that the hundreds of Windschuttle denouncers, with all their tax paid incomes have come up with to date to demonstrate the alleged â€œhole of such magnitudeâ€? in Windschuttleâ€™s thesis.

Stephen wonders who is more right Windschuttle or Reynolds and believes he caught Windschuttle out in a biased interpretation (more info please). The point is Stephan can scrutinize Windschuttleâ€™s death toll data; itâ€™s all laid down for all to see. Reynolds holds most of his cards up so only he can scrutinize them. In â€œWhitewashâ€? Reynolds claims knowledge of: â€œliterally dozens, if not hundreds, of references to the murderous attacks by the â€˜borderersâ€™ as they were called.â€? He has been claiming such knowledge since 1981, when his â€œvoluminous, various and uncontrovertibleâ€? evidence of â€œa great loss of lifeâ€? spawned his figure of 20,000 Aborigines killed throughout Australia. After Windschuttle exposed that figure to be a guess, Reynolds claimed once again, in 2000, that he had: â€œcollected hundreds of references to frontier violence. So abundant was the material and so convincing that I eventually stopped noting new references. I could have written a large and detailed book on frontier violence with copious documentation but it would have been a repetitive and ultimately depressing exerciseâ€?. Repetitive or not, why not prove his case once and for all and win a major victory of the history wars? He wouldnâ€™t even have to fund this project himself like Windschuttle did; no doubt he could pick up an ARC grant and get a University press to publish his large book.

Five years and a couple of books later, and Reynolds is still invoking all this unrevealed evidence that â€œmany scholarsâ€? back with â€œdetailed, meticulousâ€? evidence. So where is it all? Wouldnâ€™t â€œWhitewashâ€? be an ideal place to reveal at least some of it? What better way to put Windschuttle in his place? Reynolds couldnâ€™t reveal his evidence there, he explains, because: â€œspace forbids any more than a brief reference to the extensive literature.â€? So he presents two quotes, neither of which contains evidence of any specific killings. If any think Iâ€™m misrepresenting Reynolds, I canâ€™t really blame them – but they can read it on page 129 of â€œWhitewashâ€?.

Reynoldsâ€™ modus operandi is to invoke his â€œmountain of researchâ€? and endorse himself as the repository of knowledge gleaned from â€œofficial documents,â€¦letters â€¦newspaper articlesâ€? etcetera, and commend his interpretation of it. We are to take his word for it, for how could we expect a national treasure to undertake the depressing task of tabulating all that evidence so we can scrutinize it?

Well our taxes paid for much of his career and pivotal decisions were influenced by Reynoldsâ€™ interpretation of his â€œcopious documentationâ€?. I for one taxpayer want to see it. It is time he put up or…

â€˜Other colonised cultures, such as the Maori, had a concept of ownership; the Tasmanianâ€™s didnâ€™t.â€™
Ergo, the land wasnâ€™t theirs?
John, I havenâ€™t read Windschuttle or Reynolds and I probably wonâ€™t. But I have seen them debating on TV on a few occasions and have read a few threads like this where people spar about their ideas and approaches. I wouldnâ€™t have anything like the learning youâ€™d bring to the subject but I have a fair idea of their respective approaches and why they are opposed. Itâ€™s only a comment thread after all, and just my 2c. Anyway, have you never made a judgement that wasnâ€™t backed by comprehensive study? Put it this way – have you ever had a pop in conversation at say Bob Ellis or Noam Chomsky? How much of their work had you read at the time?
No-one these days can be a real polymath, thereâ€™s too many FACTS about and not enough time to cram them into your melon. All most of us can do is try and keep up with the History Wars and Culture Wars etc in between working long hours, changing nappies, commenting on blogs and having a kip.
From here it seems that both Reynolds and Windschuttle have had to trim their sails subsequent to their battles, with each manâ€™s â€˜campâ€™ convinced the other has the bloodier nose. Just as Windschuttleâ€™s fidelity to the record will exert a pull toward a greater factual stringency in â€˜bleeding heartâ€™ contributions to the disputed ground, so the Reynolds campsâ€™ assiduous efforts to demonstrate how much of the story would be missed with an all-Windschuttle approach has an salutary value for the dries. Surely our history, or rather, History, benefits by this process. Both sides have had to make concessions that show up the extent to which their preconceptions conditioned their conclusions and that leaves a wider, more open channel thru which future assessments can be made. And of course it was enormous fun for all concerned, even ill-informed nobodies like me!
I mentioned earlier the fact that the US doesnâ€™t do body counts means; this means the â€˜factsâ€™ for future historians will be rather thin on the ground. The US in say Fallujah and the colonists in Tassie were overwhelmingly more powerful and resourceful than the local inhabitants and that power enabled them to (1) kill a lot of locals and (2) limit or exclude public knowledge of at least some of the killing. Nothing unusual really, itâ€™s almost a law of military power relations when theyâ€™re so lopsided. Would you disagree?
This isnâ€™t to say it was a free for all; just that any official accounting cannot be the whole story. That approach is as unwise as pretending you can cast a line into the past and dredge up numbers which have no basis in the record. The truth as always lies someplace between.

Jack,…Anyway youâ€™re probably right â€“ you do have a flair for ephemera, but a corollary weakness in relation to bigger pictures. A bit like those hagiohistorians eh?

This statement does not make any sense at all, either in relation to what I said or in relation to the project of the so-called “hagiohisorians”. (Huntingon, Murray, Diamond being out of their depth in history compared to the far hind-sighted Codell?!)

Glenn Condell – Iâ€™ve had more than my fair share of space so Iâ€™ll keep my reply brief. I donâ€™t say that you have to read all the books before you have a right to an opinion â€“ Iâ€™ll leave that to academics like Dirk Moses http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=3320
Yes I do condemn Ellis and Chompsky without reading their works. I judge them by the bits I do read and by what trustworthy commentators say they say.

The problem you have is that those who you should be able to rely on, the humanities and social science academics, are not trustworthy commentators. That has been demonstrated most recently by â€œWhitewashâ€? and by the number of academics who back it to the hilt. There are exceptions, but I wouldnâ€™t want to harm their careers by naming them.

Hanson is the one I’m thinking of most; he probably gets his dates right, but he gets such a boner about the mighty American military behemoth he can’t think straight about it. An appropriate distance from the subject is one of the good historians accoutrements.

There are very good reasons for reporting deaths/population, rather than just deaths when trying to assess the degree of violence in a society. For example, comparing the reported murder rate of Papua New Guinea vs. Malaysia, we find that PNG has a lower murder rate (if one accounts for unreported murders then it might be higher, but for the purposes of this example, I’m going to ignore that). Does this mean that Malaysia is a more dangerous place than PNG? No. It is simply a consequence of the two countries having significantly different populations.

Far from being a “disgusting misrepresentations”, Mark Finnane’s conclusions are pretty basic statistics.

When you write:

His graph in Whitewash titled: â€œEstimated violent death rates in Tasmania, 1824-1831 based on Windschuttle data 2002â€? depicts soaring death rates for Aborigines, nearly twenty times as high as the white death rates â€“ for years when more whites were being killed than Aborigines. Doesnâ€™t this imply that the violence was much worse for the Aborigines than for the whites? And if the violence was much worse for the Aborigines than for the whites while nearly twice as many whites were being killed than Aborigines, doesnâ€™t that imply a white life, according to Finnaneâ€™s calculations, is worth less than an Aboriginal life?

I think that your misunderstanding Finnane’s point. He isn’t trying to imply that white people are worth more or less than Aborigines. Rather he is pointing out that Windschuttles thesis is internally inconsistent. If you accept Windschuttle’s numbers (and I don’t – but that’s another story), then the picture that emerges is far from a “nuns picnic” – rather you observe death rates which are comparable with a fall blown war. That the white death rate was considerably lower doesn’t mean that whites are worth less than blacks, but rather that the white death rate was considerably lower than the black death rate.

I’m glad that you’ve added qualifiers to Windschuttles quote. Unfortunally, when it was published (History as a travesty of truth, The Australian, 9/12/02) there were no such qualifiers (there was also nothing about contacting him if you knew of any other cases). Nothing about it only being confined to the killings confirmed in the historic record. It quite clearly stated that the British were only responsible for 118 deaths. It doesn’t worry me that the number has risen to 121, but what does worry me is the assumption that unless a death is recorded in the historical it didn’t happen. That quite frankly is just plain stupid for a number of obvious reasons.

“His graph in Whitewash titled: â€œEstimated violent death rates in Tasmania, 1824-1831 based on Windschuttle data 2002â€? depicts soaring death rates for Aborigines, nearly twenty times as high as the white death rates â€“ for years when more whites were being killed than Aborigines. ”

This is the crux of the disagreement between Windschuttle and Reynolds (and me, among others). Reynolds starts with the presumption that, in a conflict between a group armed with guns and one armed with spears, the group armed with spears is going to suffer more casualties.

Windschuttle starts with the presumption that, in a conflict in which only one side keeps written records, the side keeping records will document casualties on the other side at least as faithfully as it documents its own. He bolsters this up with the assumption that, as Christians, the convicts and jailers of Van Diemen’s Land were committed to peace and non-violence.

My comment was: â€œThis, along with his disgusting misrepresentationsâ€¦â€? The â€œthisâ€? clearly referred to the exclusive reliance on the per-capita-per-annum statistic, so the â€œdisgusting misrepresentationsâ€? clearly referred to something else. One of Finnaneâ€™s misrepresentations has Windschuttle making the â€œstatistical errorâ€? of â€œusing figures for a number of years against a denominator of just one yearâ€™s populationâ€?, when Finnane knew full well (or should have) that no statistical error was involved.

There are valid ways to use the per-capita-per-annum statistic, the way Finnane uses it in â€œWhitewashâ€? is not one of them.

PS: Re your last post: my qualification was Windschuttleâ€™s explanation when he introduced his tally in his book.

Guns may not have been much, if any, of an advantage for Tasmania’s whites prior to the widespread availability of repeating weapons. The typical flintlock user of the day was hard pressed to fire three rounds per minute in ideal conditions – imagine trying to reload quickly while being charged by a group of spear wielding locals. Flintlocks are also unreliable, being inclined to misfire. For the typical user flintlocks were inaccurate, with an effective range of some 50 meters â€“ this explains the military tactic of massed fire. They were large and heavy weapons difficult to wield and fire at all, much less accurately, in rough or wooded terrain.

Tasmania’s Aborigines would have quickly twigged in to the flintlock’s limitations and adpated their strategy accordingly.

Reynolds agrees with J F Beck. On page 42 of “Fate of a Free People”, he says: “The muskets of the period were extremely unreliable and were certainly no more accurate than a spear thrown by an experienced hunter. Numerous spears could be dispatched while white men were reloading”. Reynolds insists that the Aborigines bested the British in bush combat. This is consistent with Windschuttle’s tally of more whites killed than blacks, and inconsistent with Reynolds’ “general estimates” of more blacks killed than whites.

BTW, Windschuttle exposes much more than the “one erroneous quote” that Reynolds was trapped into admitting to a reporter. Reynolds keeps very quiet about these exposures in “Whitewash”. He must count on “Whitewash” readers not reading “Fabrication” or not noticing or not caring.